To Every Woman Who Has Lifted Me Up, Thank You

At some point in your life, while you're not paying attention, you grow up.

You have a career, not a job. You fall in love, or out of love. You get a pet or maybe you have a child or two (or both).

You stop doubting your choices so much. You look in the mirror each day and see a little more of your own mother staring back at you each time.

You go to a party and look around at your friends, and they're killing it daily. At work, at life, at whatever they do. You have a moment on the train home, reminiscing about those heady days of your early 20s, sitting around drinking too much and confiding your glorious dreams to each other.

It seems so far away and yet, if you close your eyes, you cannot see the time that’s passed. You don’t know where you’ve gone, that kid staring out across the horizon, thinking she has all the time in the world to reach it.

Eventually, it dawns on you that this is what adult life feels like, and you're doing this, lady.

That moment of realization hits in big ways and small.

While getting ready for the first day at your new, important job. While holding your own baby for the very first time. Maybe in the shower, while you're congratulating yourself on having remembered to buy a new razor, or when you managed to take out the trash cans on garbage night.

For me, it often hits on International Women's Day, as I take stock of all the women in my life and the ways in which they've pushed and pulled me up into the woman that I am today.

I don't think only about the big names of feminism and women's activism on this day.

Instead, I remember my first-grade teacher who taught me just how long five minutes really is. I remember my grandmother's best friend who lived a full and raucous life before she died of breast cancer when I was eight.

I remember my very first true friend, a girl who had more heart and brains than anyone I knew but was shy and timid and wouldn't stop crying unless I sat with her for the first two weeks of school.

I remember my father's friend who wore two different earrings, never matching, and made me wonderful clothes like a striped pink pinafore with animal pockets (an elephant, a giraffe and lions, if I remember correctly).

I remember my great grandmother who could beat you at cards with the most unbelievable poker face and the luckiest hand in the pack.

I remember the netball coach who taught our team of uncoordinated misfits the rules of the game patiently and methodically, building us over two seasons into a top tier team. She taught us winning wasn't everything, but that to win you had to work together.

I remember my high school friends, who dreamed of futures beyond the city we lived in, careers in other parts of the world, lives unfurling before us like ribbons flapping in the breeze as we lay in the park after school talking about who we would be.

I remember my best friend at university telling me about her upbringing, in some ways very similar to mine, and looking in the eyes of a person I knew understood me. She was loyal like me, and fiercely so, and when I moved away she gave me a pendant with "sister" engraved on the back in Greek (her heritage) because our friendship was important enough to mark.

I remember my friend who picked me up when my heart was broken at the end of a long relationship. Who moved into the house I had shared with the man who was gone and just quietly began putting me back together with patient listening skills and a refusal to judge my Grey's Anatomy binges.

I remember the women I've worked for since I first began my career, who have offered help and advice to make my work better and listened without judgment when I felt low or stressed, or was unsure how to deal with a tricky situation. Who put me forward for challenges because they believed I could do it, who advocated for me to get the promotions I wanted, to get the career I thought I deserved.

I had some wonderful male bosses, but the women were something else.

I remember my female colleagues, always quick to listen or suggest a way to make my work better and never too busy to help when I needed it. The work friend who sat with me in the lunchroom at my lowest, kept my confidences and helped me to keep on going, even when I didn't think that I could.

Women get told to hold their ambition close, to not share it with their rivals (other women, duh), and to watch their backs in the workplace. And yes, sometimes, our fiercest critics are other women, but for the most part, ours is criticism meant to help, honed through years of experiencing this thing we call Being a Woman in the World.

I can't list every woman who has lifted me up and built me into who I see when I look in the mirror. There are too many to even try. When I look back on how I did that thing we all fail to realize we're doing, you know, growing up—of course it's the women I keep returning to.

Their lessons about work and love and living. Their passion and generosity. Their gentle needling to expect the best from myself, to see the best in myself, to try and fulfill the promise of this moment in time.

To be a woman, in a generation of women, raised up in households with women who worked, who dreamt, who strived to be anything they wanted to be, seemed on the cusp of adulthood, a life of endless possibility.

Our generation, raised on "girl power" and taught to be equal to the boys, has gone out a little unprepared for the reality of Being a Woman in the World. We had not really seen the obstacles and problems first hand, but the women who had gone before and were still out there, working and living? They knew.

And they work every day to raise us all up.

What do you see when you close your eyes and think about what made you, you?

It's who shaped you.

Who you admire and look up to. Your mentors, your work wife, your friends, even your detractors, who in their own ways spur you on, challenging you to be your best (and your worst).

To know that you can make mistakes, or choices that won't please everyone—all of it is living and all of it is learning. All of it propels us forward, towards a point in the future where the girls and women who come next will no longer have to have our same fights or worry about the inequities we grapple with today.

And when you look back again and think about all the women that raised you up, think back a little further still, to the ones who came before, and the fights they started, fought, and often, won.

Think about how to be here, today, as women with the rights and freedoms we have, is to stand on the shoulders of every incredible agitator who came before.

Take a moment, a day even, to celebrate it. And then keep on fighting.

For all the women still to come.

This essay originally appeared on Spring.St. You can read it here.